Noah Baumbach

Indie darling Noah Baumbach is to film what Jonathan Lethem is to books-a Brooklynite who's built a career out of remembering what the borough was like before it became chic.

The son of novelist Jonathan Baumbach and ex-Village Voice movie critic Georgia Brown, Baumbach was 24 when he made his writing/directing debut with Kicking and Screaming, an indie-circuit hit. He all but dropped off the radar until 2004, when he co-wrote The Life Aquatic with Wes Anderson. The next year he caught Hollywood's attention-and earned an Oscar nomination for best screenplay-with sleeper drama The Squid and the Whale, a barely fictionalized account of his Park Slope upbringing and his erudite parents' nasty divorce. He's since kept up working with Anderson on the likes of Fantastic Mr. Fox and his own work like Margot at the Wedding and Greenberg. In his spare time, Baumbach pens the
occasional piece for the "Shouts & Murmurs" section of The New Yorker.

Baumbach married actress Jennifer Jason Leigh in 2005. The pair have a child but divorced in 2011. [Image via Getty]